Food products of different consistency can be sliced in a high cutting sequence with such cutting apparatuses which are also termed slicers. The product slices produced in this process are supplied—combined in portions—with the help of conveying devices disposed downstream of the cuffing apparatus directly to a packaging machine which produces ready-to-sell portion packages. The presentation of sliced food products is becoming more and more important in sales. There is therefore an endeavor to form more and more complex arrangements of product slices by a sophisticated “portion design”, and indeed already on slicing where possible so that the portions already having the desired “design” can be supplied directly to the packaging machine without the arrangement of the product slices having to be changed again.
Portioning bands arranged directly downstream of the cutting knives are already known which can be moved in order to form portions from product slices which fall onto the portioning band and whose shape differs from stacks of product slices disposed more or less precisely over one another. Overlapping portions can thus be produced, for example, in that the portioning band is moved relatively slowly in the conveying direction during the slicing process until the portion is complete and the portioning band accelerates to transport the portion away. Complex product geometries have previously not been able to be formed in practice in a simple manner since a corresponding programming of the movable portioning bands is extremely complex and can at best only be effected by trained specialists and only with a large effort of time.